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“Pregnancy is Not a Disease”: Birth of an Anti-Contraception Rallying Cry

By Sarah Morice-Brubaker

…thing for it to be a trend. Wait. What’s this? From Ina May Gaskin, earth-mama midwife and not-Roman-Catholic hippie commune cofounder, in an excerpt from her March 2011 book, Birth Matters: A Midwife’s Manifesta: [P]regnancy is not an illness in need of treatment, and nature’s design of women is not considered flawed. (emphasis mine, again. I am very emphatic.) And we have a meme! But let’s consider this claim more closely. I don’t mean for this…

Picasso’s Sacred Monster Eats Chicago: A Mystery Solved?

By Jeremy Biles

…o. What does this mysterious sculpture depict? Popular answers include: an aardvark, a bird, an Afghan hound, and one of Picasso’s lovers. But to my eyes, it looks like a sphinx—a monster that (like the anamorphic skull haunting Hans Holbein’s famous painting The Ambassadors) only snaps into focus when viewed from an oblique perspective. To perceive the recumbent sphinx you have to approach the piece not from the front, but from behind and to the…

Ex-Gay Conversion Therapy: Choosing Religion Over Sex

By Lynne Gerber

…avor of sexual identity. But, after years of studying and writing about reparative therapy and the ex-gay movement, and after reading Rich Wyler’s own account of his sexual conversion, I found NPR’s story, and Schumacher-Matos’ defense of it, shallow and dispiriting. Married with Children There is much to criticize in the story, and much to attend to in the responses to it. Warren Throckmorton, Candace Chellew-Hodge, and Joanna Brooks have all rai…

Change v. Change at NPR

By Warren Throckmorton

…ersion therapy on Monday. Today, NPR’s ombudsman, Edward Schumacher-Matos, analyzed Monday’s story in light of the negative reaction from listeners. Briefly, Alix Spiegel interviewed Rich Wyler, founder of Journey into Manhood, and Peterson Toscano, a man who went spent 17 years in an unsuccessful effort to change his orientation. Schumacher-Matos correctly points out that much of the negative reaction centered on the presentation of Wyler and Tos…

Dispatch from Charlottesville: “It Was a War Zone. It Felt Like There Were a Million Nazis.”

By Sunnivie Brydum

…Saturday’s planned “Unite the Right” rally. On Saturday, Henderson-Espinoza and Rev. Traci Blackmon were outside Emancipation Park offering prayerful presence and witness when neo-Nazis, fascists, and unhooded Ku Klux Klan members descended on the intersection, unleashing violence that caused the security detail protecting Blackmon and Henderson-Espinoza to literally yank Rev. Blackmon off-camera during a live interview with MSNBC’s Joy Reid. (Vi…

Why Don’t White People Show Up For Juneteenth The Way They Showed Up For George Floyd?

By A. E. Brooks-Key

…ul discussions of race and slavery, Americans by and large are woefully incapable of coming to terms with what slavery was and what slavery wrought upon America’s descendants of slaves and slaveholders (and all those in-between). So, the surrealness of people essentially greeting each other “Happy End of Slavery Day” is almost like a skit from Chappelle’s Show. A second observation from my Juneteenth sojourns is that White people do not attend Jun…

The Faith Outreach Canard

By Sarah Posner

…he Eleison Group, who the RNS article notes worked doing faith outreach on a number of Democratic campaigns in 2006 and 2008 but not in 2010. In both the RNS interview and in an article on Huffington Post, Sapp argues for a causal link between lackluster faith outreach in this election cycle and Democratic losses; his conclusion: “the results were disastrous.” To support this argument, Sapp claims the following: Compared to ’06, Democrats national…

Loving Uganda to Death: The Global Reach of Far-Right Christian Hatred

By Peter Montgomery

…th the emotional punch delivered by God Loves Uganda, a new documentary by Academy Award-winning director Roger Ross Williams that premiered at this year’s Sundance Film Festival. “I love Uganda,” says Kapya Koama in the film’s opening words. But, “something frightening is happening that has the potential to destroy Uganda.” Filmmaker Williams was given remarkable access to leaders and missionaries affiliated with the International House of Prayer…

Top Five (Less Sensational, But More Dangerous) Things to Remember About Pat Robertson (1930-2023)

By Mark Hulsether

…to a tragic hurricane in Haiti, which he called a punishment from God for Satanism—the same episode that Chrissy Stroop ranked as number one on her own top 10 list, and a worthy contender, no doubt! But since Robertson liked to say outrageous things like this on a regular basis, I created a list more attuned to underlying structural aspects of his resume: less about preposterous provocations and more about his work as a cog in the everyday banalit…

Haiti and the Push for Theological Questions

By Paula M. Cooey

…the idea of challenging traditional conceptions of God is particularly unbearable in the face of suffering. This is psychologically understandable. That there might be no God, that God is ultimately indifferent to human suffering, that God is less than all powerful, that the events themselves challenge all attempts to find meaning—such possibilities are less likely to be entertained, because the very idea of meaninglessness, on the face of it, an…